Malicious Gossip

by Khushwant Singh

  “He couldn’t have had many friends.”

  “He knows a lot of people but has very few close friends,” she replied. “Ranmat Singh has always been very close. Then there was Asif Ansari who became a judge of the Allahabad High Court. He died in 1978.”

  “Who were the men who influenced him most?”

  “Most of all it was his own elder brother, Sant Bux Singh. Then there were Jayaprakash Narayan and Vinoba Bhave. Lai Bahadur Shastri was his political guide and philosopher when he first entered political life.”

  V.P.’s initiation into politics came indirectly through Lai Bahadur Shastri in whose parliamentary constituency Manda and Daiya lay—and directly through his elder brother Sant Bux who resigned his job with Lever Brothers to seek a political future. They did not share a common political commitment. Sant Bux inclined towards socialism; V.P. preferred to toe the Congress Party line. He attracted Shastri’s attention when he gave his estate to the Bhoodan—and when Vinoba Bhave refused to take all of it, gave what had been returned to him to the school he had set up. “Don’t say I and them,” Vinoba told him. “Say we.” He also gave away part of the Manda palace for the Lai Bahadur Shastri Seva Niketan. He got Rs seven and a half lakh in compensation for the zamindari taken over by the government and thought he would try his hand at real estate business. He did a certain amount of buying and selling of land in New Delhi till Sant Bux decided to fight the 1967 parliamentary elections from Fatehpur. This was V.P.’s first experience of elections. Sant Bux won an easy victory. Two years later, V.P. himself stood on a Congress ticket for the UP Vidhan Sabha and found himself an MLA. And two years later (1971) both brothers fought the Lok Sabha elections and won. V.P.’s constituency was Phulpur (Allahabad).

  V.P. took his parliamentary responsibilities seriously and tried to specialize in science, technology and energy. In 1974 when Mrs Gandhi was looking for a UP Thakur to counterbalance Dinesh Singh’s hold on the community, she consulted Kamalapati Tripathi and Dev Kanta Barua, then President of the Congress. Kamalapati recommended Sant Bux. Barua, without any prompting, suggested V.P. Singh. She accepted Barua’s recommendation and much to everyone’s, including V.P.’s, surprise appointed him Deputy Minister of Commerce. She knew if she appointed Sant Bux, V.P. would have been very happy. If she appointed V.P, his elder brother was bound to feel peeved. She enjoyed creating discord.

  V.P. remained Minister throughout the Emergency: his only unpleasant experience was having his pocket picked in Lucknow and having to borrow money from a friend. He paid the price for his support of the Emergency and like Mrs Gandhi was swept out of Parliament by the Janata wave. He continued to fight the Janata regime and was thrice arrested and interred in Naini Jail. When Mrs Gandhi swept back to power, V.P. regained the Allahabad seat. It was at Mrs Gandhi’s instance that he gave up his seat in Parliament and took over as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and was elected Member of the state Vidhan Sabha. He resigned the Chief Ministership in June 1982 as a sequel to two massacres in one night, one of them of a Harijan family. At the time there were few politicians who could do that sort of thing.

  Seven months later he was made Minister of Commerce and later was returned to the Rajya Sabha. He was President of the UP Congress Committee when Mrs Gandhi was assassinated. He was the real architect of the Congress Party’s victory in the elections that followed in December 1984. Eighty-three of UP’s eighty-five seats in Parliament, including Rajiv Gandhi’s from Amethi, were won by the Congress. He was Rajiv Gandhi’s choice as Finance Minister in place of Pranab Mukerjee who had forfeited his trust. It was to his credit that the first budget he presented, though totally at variance with Pranab’s way of thinking, was warmly supported and welcomed by the captains of industry. Nani Palkhivala, a director of Tatas and the country’s best-known expert of budgetary finance, who always manages to pick holes in most budgets, was full of praise for V.P.’s first budget.

  V.P.’s troubles began with his determination to go for tax evaders and violators of foreign exchange rules. His victims included the aged and highly respected industrialist Kirloskar, and L.M. Thapar, who was uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister. The net began to tighten around more people in the Prime Minister’s inner circle, notably the Bachchan brothers. There can be little doubt that V.P.’s shift to the Defence Ministry and his subsequent sacking was to prevent further exposures of skeletons in Rajiv’s cupboards. Another short verse from his own pen summarizes his plight:

  I have been cut into pieces

  But my value remains the same;

  I was a solid coin

  Now I have become small change.

  The truth about financial skulduggery remains unknown. It cannot be controverted that V.P. Singh has emerged from the imbroglio as a man with a clean image and Rajiv Gandhi as one not-so-clean as he was believed to be when he first took office. In four lines V.P. sums up corruption among the rich:

  Who does not convert

  “Black” into “White”?

  Some do it by cooking their accounts,

  Others by the help of a hair dye.

  Has V.P. Singh a political philosophy? Is he left or right of centre? Or a middle-headed opportunist unconcerned with the means he adopts and the allies he chooses to pedestal himself to Prime Ministership? Journalists like M.J. Akbar have accused him of consorting with right-wing, anti-Muslim parties like the BJP and the RSS. Kamalapati Tripathi, himself the most devious of politicians, has charged him with knowing no more than the first three letters of the English alphabet: A for Amitabh, B for Bofors, C for Chaddha. Going by reports of his speeches appearing in the press, one may be forgiven if one agrees with Tripathi’s assessment. “What am I to do?” asks V.P., “if all that pressmen everywhere pick out of my speeches are Amitabh-Ajitabh, Bofors and Chaddhas because they think they are in the news and whatever else I have to say about the state of the nation is not. I have very clear notions of my priorities.”

  I asked V.P. to spell out his socio-political plan of action. Uppermost in his mind is changing the system that breeds the anti-people nexus of politicians and big business. The big business and politician combine vitiates not only the polity but also the economy. V.P.’s remedy for this is state funding of politics, and extension of democratic processes to all levels. Political parties like the Congress have had no elections for many years. As a result, power has remained concentrated in a few hands. Instead of recognizing efficiency as the criterion to entrust power to such people, the system extends patronage only to those it can count on for support. A party should sustain itself by what its members contribute. Or the state should fund them during elections in proportion to their prior performances. Their accounts must be fully and regularly audited and it must be ensured that a clique does not consolidate its hold on it. The chief executive of every party should be elected periodically; otherwise the party will become feudal in character and unable to serve the people. The democratic process should be taken down to the grassroots. For seventeen years UP has had no Zilla Parishad election; thousands of municipalities have likewise continued to malfunction because their members have not renewed their mandate. Such lethargy deadens democratic reflexes. We should amend our Constitution to ensure elections at all levels down to the village panchayats. Entrusting full powers to elected bodies will inevitably bring the administration closer to the people. “Issues must go beyond milestones of elections,” says V.P. Singh.

  He is equally concerned with the surfacing of religious and caste considerations in the selection of candidates and their pattern of voting. He thinks that we should give serious consideration to proportional representation as a possible solution.

  Industry should likewise be democratized with fuller representation to workers on boards of directors who should be ensured a fair share of the fruits of their toil. This will effectively curb irresponsible trade unionism.

  The agricultural sector and prices of agricultural produce need a thorough overhaul. When fixing prices of produce, it i
s not good enough to only add up prices of inputs. The cost of living, comprising items of men’s consumption like the price of cloth, should also be taken into account. Special care has to be taken of unorganized landless labour, and Scheduled Castes and Tribes. They must be given possession of land they till and their eighteen per cent quota of seats should remain available to them at all times and not be filled by others.

  Communalism? We have communalized politics and politicians rouse communal passions to retain power. If instead of being organized on religious lines we were to reorganize our society on the basis of common economic interests—farmers, weavers, factory workers, etc.—we would with one stroke kill the canker of communalism and bring the fruits of development to the people.

  V.P. scoffs at insinuations against his secularism. “In my home Muslims were as acceptable as Hindus. During Moharram tazias used to pass in front of our home and I with my father would go to pay respects. In Manda the estate had its own tazia also. When violence broke out in Moradabad, I offered to resign my Chief Ministership.” After a pause he added with deliberation, “Anyone who harbours communal prejudices has no right to call himself civilized.”

  I asked him about the kind of reception he has had during his tour of different states: Bihar, UP, Bengal, MP, Karnataka, Andhra, Gujarat and Rajasthan. He did not exaggerate. “It is difficult to assess crowds. What is more important than the numbers who turn up to hear me is that all over the country they want a drastic change in their governance.”

  I asked him of his reaction to his critics in the press. He brushed the question aside: “They say whatever comes to their mind; I cannot answer all of them. I talk to the people and they give me the answers.”

  Balwant Gargi

  I don’t recall when I first met Gargi, except that it was in the home of a good-looking lass whom he had succeeded in leading astray from the straight and narrow path of matrimony. What had she found in him? He was a short, squat man who punctuated his talk with feminine gestures. He walked with a mincing gait like one afraid of slipping. He was said to be a good playwright. Since he wrote in Punjabi and only rarely were his plays staged, few people knew his real worth. He was certainly an engaging talker and had the knack of surrounding himself with attractive women and persuading quite a few of them that a Dunlopillo mattress was not necessary to make bed an exciting place. I did not read or see any of his plays but did get to read an anthology of profiles. They were the wittiest pieces of prose I had ever read in Punjabi. They were obviously designed to hurt and succeeded in doing so. Thereafter, every time Gargi produced a book, he lost a dozen of his closest friends. He made up the loss by acquiring new admirers. In his younger days he professed communism (we all did), then jettisoned it (so did we) and landed a job to teach Indian drama at Seattle University. He produced an excellent book on the Indian theatre in English. I complimented him on writing 300 pages on a subject that did not exist. He arrived back from Seattle with a lovely blonde American wife, Jeannie. All of Balwant’s friends fell in love with the Gargis.

  It was a misalliance. Balwant’s diet was literary sarson ka saag; Jeannie’s was American apple pie. Gargi wanted appreciation of what he wrote and produced; Jeannie never bothered to learn Punjabi and was therefore unable to become a part of her husband’s alaque. Gargi was gregarious, open-hearted in his hospitality, with not much in his kitty to be open-hearted about. Jeannie cherished the privacy of her home and could not stomach people dropping in at all hours. She also had an enormous appetite for food which embarrassed Balwant for the simple reason that his friends might think he did not give her enough to eat at home.

  It was Balwant who took the irrevocable step to break the marriage by committing adultery. He gives an emotionally charged account of his lustful encounter with one of his girl students, in a garage from where he could see his wife and children through the window. The affair was entirely physical. “While making love to Raji, I always came out with the wildest truths—the sins I had committed. How I had slept with a seventeen-year-old girl when I was twenty-three. Once her mother caught us and lost her temper. When I broke down, she soothed me, ‘Son, you must know my daughter is to marry soon. She is innocent. I cannot allow it ... It’s a sin.’ She caressed me and held my head in her lap with a purity and affection that I had not known. At night, she seduced me, kissing me like a mother and then suddenly changing her passion into naked lust, whispering ‘my son, my son!’ all the time. After that she would allow me to take her daughter. I began to sleep with both of them.”

  Raji laughed, “If I were your mother, I would also have seduced you!”

  The affair with Raji, whose breasts he says had opium on them, came to a sticky end. By then Jeannie had launched on a liaison on her own. Balwant’s machismo was deeply wounded. The injured tone he adopts over Jeannie’s behaviour is hard to swallow.

  Balwant Gargi is like a cactus flower. He hurts anyone he touches. In his autobiography, The Naked Triangle (Vikas), he barely conceals the identity of the people he writes about. Some are mentioned by their real names. There is the writer, film producer, Rajinder Singh Bedi, now in his sixties, recounting his affair with a nineteen-year-old girl who bared her bosom to him as a sort of introductory “how do you do?” It makes nice erotica. But one does not need much imagination to know how the lady in the episode, Mrs Bedi, her children and grandchildren, will react to this disclosure.

  Balwant Gargi’s book is largely set in Chandigarh. The Punjab University’s academic circles are up in arms against him for having portrayed them with their shirts up, pants and salwars down. Balwant Gargi will have to find new friends in Delhi. I will be one of them—till he writes about me.

  Dhiren Bhagat

  Two years ago Dhiren Bhagat wrote my obituary for an Indian journal. Some of it was flattering: my being larger than life and a journalists’ father-figure; some not so flattering: my undeserved and self-generated reputation of being a drunkard and a womanizer, whereas I had in fact slept with nothing more animated than a hot water bottle. Most of it was just having fun at my expense. Many people, who didn’t read beyond the first few lines lamenting my demise, fired off long telegrams and letters of condolence to my “widow”.

  I live to write Dhiren Bhagat’s obituary. He is in fact dead. It was an untimely death: he was only thirty-one. A cruel death: he was crushed under a bus while overtaking another. And a singularly tragic one as he was the only child of his parents and a young man with enormous promise as a writer and a journalist.

  Dhiren came to see me soon after he returned from Oxford. He was a pretty, effeminate, red-lipped boy in gold-rimmed glasses, dressed in khadi kurta-pyjama with a silk shawl draped about his shoulders. He had the cultivated stutter of the English upper class. He had political aspirations and seemed to have acquired the neta’s garb as the first step towards achieving netahood. I gathered he was related to my wife whose mother was a Bhagat. I got the impression that he was a phoney.

  Then I began to see his articles in The Spectator. My opinion of him changed. They were extremely well-researched, witty, and beautifully worded. I became a fan. After reading some of his articles on Punjab, I persuaded him to do a book on the subject and took him to meet President Zail Singh. Thereafter, whenever he happened to be in Delhi he dropped in to see me. I took him out to dine with friends. Although a teetotaller and a vegetarian, he was great company.

  When it came to meeting deadlines, Dhiren proved to be elusive. He always had a plausible excuse: he was short of money and compelled to write for papers to meet his day-to-day expenses. My colleague in Penguin India, David Davidar, agreed with me that we should tie him down with a contract. He was the only author on our list to whom we paid an advance royalty. Then he had another set of excuses: he had become correspondent of The Observer (London); he was in love, jilted by his girlfriend and accident-prone: while covering the hola mohalla at Anandpur, he was knocked down by a cavalry of nihangs and badly bruised. He had to spend several days in hospital. E
very time we met he had some good reason for not submitting his manuscript. “It is not going to be just a journalist’s reportage but a work of art,” he would assure me. “If you want your money back, I’ll give you a cheque.” We decided to give him more time. Destiny did not. Penguin India is left poorer by a few thousand rupees; India has lost a man who might well have become one of its most illustrious sons.

  Sahir Ludhianvi

  Sentimental, sensitive, sensuous, generous but at the same time edgy, quick-tempered and quarrelsome. Sahir was all these as well as the best and the most successful of our lyricists. He was also the hardest of drinkers. Apart from Scotch, the only other thing he thirsted for was appreciation. I was surprised at the childish joy with which he celebrated the award of Padma Shri. And when his fellow Ludhianvis decided to honour him, he travelled all the way to Punjab and back to Bombay by rail (he had a morbid fear of flying) to be acclaimed by his native city.

  I had many encounters with Sahir in the homes of common friends and spent a few evenings in his house in Juhu, close to where Balraj Sahni lived. If an evening passed without an unpleasant incident, I regarded it as a minor miracle.

  Sahir was particularly touchy when he found himself in the company of the newly rich who pretended to enjoy sher-o-shairee. There is no dearth of them in Bombay where the film industry has thrown up as many millionaires as it has spawned versifiers. I recall one evening, a well-meaning Gujarati businessman began praising Sahir, but in the process misquoted one of his lines. Sahir turned on the poor (rich) fellow with a volume of abuse in a mixture of English and Punjabi-Urdu (he never got rid of his Ludhiana accent) till the other was compelled to leave—and the party was ruined. It transpired that Sahir was not expecting a drink in the house and had been taking slugs of neat Scotch all the way from Juhu to Malabar Hill.